Last-minute-Xmas-cards anyone? Phixr can help! With our new “Face-through-the-hole”-tool, you can create Xmas cards in no time. Just mark a persons face (nose in the center), activate the tool and choose from a set of images. You can rotate your face and its colors in order to fit it in properly. (Note: In case you haven’t noticed: You can move or resize the selection even if a tool window is currently open; the tool window will automatically update to the new selection).

There are two things we’d like to mention though: We added this tool today, but due to the hurry (well, can’t move christmas, can you) we also released it today without further ado, read: testing. Hence, please consider it to be “beta”.

Also, we kind of lack suitable photos at this point. If you have a photo showing a person from the front, and if you want to share your photo (including credits and a link to your site) with all those thousands of people using Phixr daily, don’t hesitate! (The minimum resolution is 1024×768. )

Today, we go for the Mix tool. This is actually quite powerful: Using this tool, you can make several photos into one. For example:

In this simple example we worked with the cheese photo, selected the target region for the Eiffel Tower photo, activated the mix tool, selected the Eiffel Tower photo for mixing, set the opacity to 0:100 and executed. By varying the opacity and the blend mode, you can create sophisticated collages:

For the “projection” of the dollar bill on the cheese, we used the “overlay” mixing mode. This actually works best if the background of the source image (here: the cheese) is white. The Eiffel Tower was mixed (mode: normal) with an opacity setting of 50:50.

Another application of this tool is merging photos. This involved a second tool, the “Add space” (or “grow canvas”) tool. We use it to add space to our first photo, into which we then mixed the second photo so that the photos don’t overlap:

In other news, scientists finally found evidence of what we all already knew: The moon is made of cheese.

Today, we decided to start a series of articles about Phixr’s features: Some of them are “buried” in the tool palette and not easily found and/or obvious. A good start is the “Decorate“-tool, symbolized by the “heart”. This tool pastes preset graphics or patterns into the photo in many different ways. A simple example is the following:

What better way to say “I love cheese”? Here, we first selected the target region of the photo (just click into the photo, and move the mouse with the button clicked) and then mixed “One heart” into the photo, at 90% opacity. Simple, isn’t it. Here’s are two more samples, with “party hat” and “light bulb” respectively:

I think you get the idea.

The “Decorate”-tool also has some stock images that are meant for the entire photo, not just a part of it. In the following two examples, we used the “Snow” and “Starglitter 3″ alternatives:

Yesterday we were bored. Terribly bored. Until someone had the idea to check out MySpace for their members’ current in-stuff. A few minutes later, we added some more images to the “Mix with preset images”-tool. Folks, now you can finally create those neat “glittering” graphics using Phixr. These seem to be extremely popular among the MySpace crowd.

While we were at it, we also added a “mode”-selector to both of the “Mix” tools. The different modes (not every one looks good in all situations) allow a bunch of new effects. Here’s one using “Dodge” mode.

And here’s another one. The same image mixed twice, each time using a different “Copy XXX channel” mode:

Erm, now there’s one more thing. We accidently dumped the “Position”-selector in the “Mix with other Photo” tool. This must have happened shortly before the relaunch. Well, long story short, it’s back. Sorrrry.

Finally, we have a 中文(简体) version of Phixr in the pipeline. The translation is in progress.